20,599 research outputs found
Data-driven discovery of coordinates and governing equations
The discovery of governing equations from scientific data has the potential
to transform data-rich fields that lack well-characterized quantitative
descriptions. Advances in sparse regression are currently enabling the
tractable identification of both the structure and parameters of a nonlinear
dynamical system from data. The resulting models have the fewest terms
necessary to describe the dynamics, balancing model complexity with descriptive
ability, and thus promoting interpretability and generalizability. This
provides an algorithmic approach to Occam's razor for model discovery. However,
this approach fundamentally relies on an effective coordinate system in which
the dynamics have a simple representation. In this work, we design a custom
autoencoder to discover a coordinate transformation into a reduced space where
the dynamics may be sparsely represented. Thus, we simultaneously learn the
governing equations and the associated coordinate system. We demonstrate this
approach on several example high-dimensional dynamical systems with
low-dimensional behavior. The resulting modeling framework combines the
strengths of deep neural networks for flexible representation and sparse
identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) for parsimonious models. It is the
first method of its kind to place the discovery of coordinates and models on an
equal footing.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures; added acknowledgment
Hierarchical Decomposition of Nonlinear Dynamics and Control for System Identification and Policy Distillation
The control of nonlinear dynamical systems remains a major challenge for
autonomous agents. Current trends in reinforcement learning (RL) focus on
complex representations of dynamics and policies, which have yielded impressive
results in solving a variety of hard control tasks. However, this new
sophistication and extremely over-parameterized models have come with the cost
of an overall reduction in our ability to interpret the resulting policies. In
this paper, we take inspiration from the control community and apply the
principles of hybrid switching systems in order to break down complex dynamics
into simpler components. We exploit the rich representational power of
probabilistic graphical models and derive an expectation-maximization (EM)
algorithm for learning a sequence model to capture the temporal structure of
the data and automatically decompose nonlinear dynamics into stochastic
switching linear dynamical systems. Moreover, we show how this framework of
switching models enables extracting hierarchies of Markovian and
auto-regressive locally linear controllers from nonlinear experts in an
imitation learning scenario.Comment: 2nd Annual Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Contro
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